Enhanced auroral activity, far side CME

Tuesday, 14 April 2015 15:44 UTC

Enhanced auroral activity, far side CME

The speed of the solar wind as well as the interplanetary magnetic field strength and solar wind plasma temperature started to increase early this morning which is likely associated with the expected arrival of a solar wind stream associated with a coronal hole on the Sun's southern hemisphere.

However, the solar wind speed is still slow right now with a speed of about 350 km/s meaning geomagnetic storming conditions should not be expected just yet. The strength of the interplanetary magnetic field is right now about 11nT and it's direction (Bz) is southward at -10nT meaning we will likely see enhanced auroral activity in the hours ahead up to a Kp-value of 4. This stands for active geomagnetic conditions with possible auroral displays visible on the horizon from northern Scotland, Norway, large parts of Sweden and Finland.

Far side coronal mass ejection

A large asymmetric full halo coronal mass ejection became visible early this morning in SOHO/LASCO imagery but it has been determined that it came from a far side event. No effects are expected from this event at Earth.

Image: A far side full halo CME can be seen on this image from SOHO.

Any mentioned solar flare in this article has a scaling factor applied by the Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC), the reported solar flares are 42% smaller than for the science quality data. The scaling factor has been removed from our archived solar flare data to reflect the true physical units.

Thank you for reading this article! Did you have any trouble with the technical terms used in this article? Our help section is the place to be where you can find in-depth articles, a FAQ and a list with common abbreviations. Still puzzled? Just post on our forum where we will help you the best we can! Never want to miss out on a space weather event or one of our news articles again? Subscribe to our mailing list, follow us on Twitter and Facebook and download the SpaceWeatherLive app for Android and iOS!

Latest news

Support SpaceWeatherLive.com!

A lot of people come to SpaceWeatherLive to follow the Sun's activity or if there is aurora to be seen, but with more traffic comes higher server costs. Consider a donation if you enjoy SpaceWeatherLive so we can keep the website online!

100%
Support SpaceWeatherLive with our merchandise
Check out our merchandise

Latest alerts

Get instant alerts!

Space weather facts

Last X-flare2024/11/06X2.39
Last M-flare2024/11/10M4.2
Last geomagnetic storm2024/11/09Kp5 (G1)
Spotless days
Last spotless day2022/06/08
Monthly mean Sunspot Number
October 2024166.4 +25
November 2024187.3 +20.9
Last 30 days162.6 +13.7

This day in history*

Solar flares
12004X3.67
22013X1.62
32024M4.2
42002M3.47
52001M3.33
DstG
12004-263G4
21991-144
32000-95G2
41998-93
51975-67G2
*since 1994

Social networks